ISS spacewalk.

ISS crew successfully complete spacewalk. :

"It was the eight spacewalk for Commander Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut, while flight engineer John Phillips , a US astronaut, was making his first."

Lost in the news about the space shuttle being grounded for being naughty and not being allowed to fly again for a while by its strict parents, is the 5 hour space walk by two of the ISS crew. 5 hours walking in space. Is that a lot of walking? How far can you walk in space with all that equipment and body suit? How hard is it? They were doing maintenance and organising science experiements. We were talking about that today. If the shuttle is grounded, how will the ISS crew get home? And how bored to death are they locked up up there in their ISS and not really being able to walk and see birds and trees?What can they actually do? Can they play ping pong? Cards? Do they have to read? How do they keep fit? Are they given puzzles to keep their minds active and can they cook steak? Can they watch TV? What do the poor things do. Once you get over the oooh-aaah phase, what then? I mean, for me, it is absolutely astounding we have people up there in a space station trying to benefit us and pioneer for the future. Can they talk to us down here on a reglar basis and in an easy way? Thanks to Jacques Cousteau, we know so much about the under water world and how that works. We don't seem to hear much about the space world past the floating around bit. Do the space programme people assume we don't want to know? Well, if our converstion is anything to go by, we had an hour's discussion about "space life" and what we thought and it was one of the most animated discussions I have had lately. Thoroughly enjoyed it.